Introducing Firebase Hosting

One nice thing about Firebase Hosting is that they're the only static site provider I could find that will render html in response to a POST request. When you make a Facebook Canvas app, they expect you to serve your site via POST. If you host on github or something, you just get a 400 error.

I've been using Firebase for a couple of months now for an iOS app I'm building for a client, and it has been a fantastic experience.

For anyone who doesn't know, it's main selling point is that it automatically syncs with the server so you can focus on the data instead of the communication protocol or replication. Its nosql data store looks like a local filesystem, so you can save trees of data to it as JSON. It also has server-side rules written in javascript that enforce constraints on data and read/write permissions per user. They also have a free test account for developers.

"What about merge conflicts?" was my first question, but luckily it has transactions on an individual node (and its subtree) that perform an "optimistic-concurrency transactional update" which basically means a compare-and-swap where you review the current value in a callback and decide whether to try to commit that value (or a new value, say, for a counter) or give up. For most other writes, you're usually just saving status updates where there is little or no danger of being rejected or encountering merge conflicts. If in doubt, it's possible to get a callback with the final value.

So when it’s all said and done, I can totally see writing a full-featured app using it without a single line of server-side code. I used their hosting while it was in development to store images (like a CDN) and it’s very simple to use from the console, so if you have a build script, it could push to production with a single call. After an exhausting ordeal battling iCloud for a different project, Firebase is so profoundly better that I will never go back.

This is a big question, and I'm biased by working at Firebase, so I'd welcome somebody from the community chiming in with their experiences. But one key differentiator worth mentioning is the realtime aspect of Firebase.

We believe that modern apps should be client-side apps that update in realtime as changes happen, without having to refresh the page or continually poll the server for updates. So this is baked into the core of Firebase. All of our features and APIs (and our new Hosting service!) were designed around this concept of how modern apps should be built.

Thanks! We worked hard to try to make a tutorial that communicated the simplicity and power of the API. Glad you liked it!

This is unrelated to the parent topic, but I like your app!

I was planning on designing something similar for an upcoming hackathon, but it definitely would not have been as good as what you already have.